The secret
Light continues his life. He cannot bear to share a bed with Misa any longer. He does not confide in her. He does not confide in anyone. He does not want her to see him at night. He tells her that he has started to see a therapist specializing in sleeping disorders to help him with his 'problem.' He does not say what the problem is and she does not ask. He knows she believes it is night terrors. His mouth goes dry when he sees the thoughts and perceptions in her eyes. He feels sick.
He does not see a therapist. He does not see anyone. He does not want to talk about it. He does not want to consider what it is. He does not want to consider what it could or couldn't be. The eyes of the rest of the world are not his eyes. He would rather rock shut in a tangle of sheets while he feels invisible fingers twisting in his hair and the scrape of teeth, unexpected, sharp, terrifying, on his skin.
There is only one being he aches to talk to and yet aches with the very idea of doing so. He will never never never never never ask the question. His eyes settle on that grinning pet of his own. He hates him. He wants to be sick at the sight of him and he dreads, above all, more than any other thing in his entire life, in his entire existence, with every fibre of his being, that this creature might one night trespass in his room while the visitation is upon him.
He locks every door now, he shuts up every window, covers all points with heavy shuttering. He fills every crack. The room is empty. The room is black. It is a cell now. It is a cell. It is a pit of darkness that is cut off from all the world. It is only comforting for Light to think of it is separate. It must be separate. It must be cut off. He thinks while he duct-tapes up all the cracks in the floorboards.
Now Light thinks about murdering Misa, truly murdering her. Not for his ideals, out of necessity or convenience but because she has been too close to him now. Her eyes have seen him when he is hollow, when he is tired, rash, near rough hysteria. She has seen what he has done to the bedroom. She hears him nailing up thick enforcements. She says goodnight to him every night. And looks at him.
She must die, Light cannot bear for her to live. He cannot bear for there to be a person living with eyes who have seen this and a mind that knows it. Even death is not enough. It is not enough. He almost needs it so that she was never born. He wants to scratch out her existence and all she has seen and known: like rough, violent lines of a pen across paper, erasing desperately, like a coin across a photograph. Nothing is enough nothing is enough now.
Once Misa is dead Light sits in the room as the light slowly dims and knows that it is not enough. As long as the world is pure outside this room though, as long as it is pure outside this house…